Do you have any other suggestions? Basically, I want to replace the \xF4 with its character equivalent (in this case it would be "ô").

In Perl, if I print that string, the \x is automatically recognized as a hex handler, and the output is the correct character. However, I am not printing, but I am passing the result as a string to another application. The other application doesn't recognize the \x, so it prints the string as is. That is why I want to handle this on the Perl side before passing the result.

Now I have another question. This regex pattern does retrieve the right character. Is there a way to use variables within the regex? For example, once the regex is run, the list would have all the characters. Can we replace the whole "\xF4" with the character?